Mid-January: Deep in Winter, But Seeing Spring

A tiny spruce tree, caged against rabbits, in my backyard. The long shadow looks a little somber, but the snow has pretty sparkles and the spruce is green--light is returning to this area of planet Earth!

We had our weird warm weather earlier this month, but there’s a few inches of snow on the ground in Iowa now. We’re back to winter.

Not deep in winter, however. When Simon and Garfunkel wanted to sing about young adult angst, their depressing image was “a winter’s day, in a deep and dark December.” I’m sure the alliteration with December sounded better, and I’ve said before that February only has 28 or 29 days because nobody in the Midwest could stand any more, but then again, let’s face it. The middle of January is the start of the downhill slide. It’s definitely getting lighter, and while weeks of cold lie ahead, we’re fast approaching the time when “average” temperatures start to go up and winter starts to lose its hold on the Northern Hemisphere.

So it was a cool, in the 20s, morning on a mostly sunny day, when much of the snow on the pavement is bound to melt that I took camera in hand to try to catch some of the birds at my feeders outside.

I missed some of what I wanted to catch. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal hanging around this morning, but they were long gone by the time I got outside. There were also a pair of squirrels sharing the spilled seeds (none too easily, they didn’t behave at all like rodent friends), but they had run off long before I arrived on the scene.

Some sparrows were at the feeders.

Still, in the maple and redbud buds, in the tiny baby evergreen in the snow, in the frond of last year’s fern, in the energy of the flocks that were fighting for food at the feeders—well, somehow, I felt pretty springy.

Yeah, the groundhog has not checked his shadow and spring doesn’t start in Iowa until later in March anyway. But two months from now is mid-March. It could be that crocus may be blooming.

So I did enjoy capturing some Jan. 15 morning light pictures.  Click the link to see more on Flickr.

Happy dreams of spring!